Pantanjali’s 8 Limbs

According to Pantanjali, Yoga aims to undermine the confusion of our ego-bound personality and guide us toward an authentic existence. This would be the True Self.

The ego-bound personality is all the ways in which we keep mistaking our identity as one that is served by the needs and wants of our physical form.

[stop flexing in the mirror]

Pantanjali wrote the sutras in an effort to guide us. His idea was that humans had a major struggle to overcome:

[Our bodies’ (the physical form) has such proximity to the highly evolved psycho-physical organism (the Spirit/Heart) giving us access to an elevated consciousness in the first place, but the process wasn’t clear, the pitfalls too many, and the mind-body (brain) so utterly unconscious] that he knew something had to be done to help us.

So… imagine your heart is a modem, with kick ass super high speed internet.And…The intangible mind, all of your connection with the Universe, is your wireless router.

So you’re hardwired. The cable goes directly from your heart to your intangible mind. BUT Somehow your mind-body (Brain) isn’t acquiring the right IP address for sustained connection. The physical form keeps on messing things up for us. Shocker.

He wanted to bring some practicality into this spiritual practice that many are missing out on. He created

The 8 Limbs of Yoga: An order of things, steps that can be taken, a ladder that could be climbed.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga:

It is by climbing these limbs that we can fall away from a common life, an existence compared to that of a self-involved consumer to Self-realization as genuine enlightenment and emancipation from all ‘things.’